


Marathon: Or, How to Catch a Runner

by NyeLew



Series: Turretverse [9]
Category: Stargate - All Series, Stargate Atlantis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-02-18 03:37:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 18,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2333828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NyeLew/pseuds/NyeLew
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the dead world of Sateda AR-1 encounters a strange Wraith beacon which broadcasts one message: Nine runners were released from this planet. Four remain. To John, that sounds like a challenge. To Rodney, it's a waste of time. The runners? Well, they're all too busy running to worry about much of anything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“’We should go to Sateda,’ she said,” quoted Rodney. He had agreed with her then, since she’d said it might contain advanced technologies unlike most of what one could find in Pegasus. “This world is nothing but piles of rocks.”

He stopped in his tracks to look around. As far as the eye could see Sateda was littered with the remains of a civilisation. The attack apparently hadn’t been that long ago – they’d arrived maybe four, five years too late to learn anything. The Wraith had destroyed everything, eliminated every last survivor.

“Those who dare defy the Wraith are punished, Rodney,” said Teyla harshly. “Despite this, there may yet be something in the bones of Sateda which will prove useful to us.” She paused. “As to what, that is your job to find.”

“She’s right, McKay,” said Sheppard amiably. “Got any cool readings?”

They’d left the Jumper in a clear field near the Stargate (which had at least been part of the city, so they hadn’t had to walk far) and walked into the bones of a dead world, as Teyla had put it.

“There’s a Wraith beacon of some sort,” he said, “but it’s not like an SOS signal…”

His Wraith was almost non-existent, but his Ancient was poor – and since the Wraith language was derived from Ancient he could pick out a couple of words from the recording.

“It’s a message. I can’t understand it, though… we’ll have to see if it’s written down near the source of the beacon.”

“It’s not some kind of trap, is it?” asked Ford. “Because I know Dr Beckett wants a live Wraith, but I’m not sure now is the time…”

“No, no,” said Rodney. It wasn’t anything like _that_. “It’s some sort of boast, or something. Probably means ‘this is a world the Wraith destroyed’, or something. But it might have a cool power source.”

“Point the way, McKay,” ordered Sheppard.

Rodney set off in the general direction of the powersource for the Wraith beacon. Hopefully they’d pass a magical, still-working, Satedan weapons factory – but Rodney felt more than a little pessimistic about that.

Soon enough, and after climbing over countless piles of rubble that were once buildings, the team came to the Wraith beacon.

It was odd, even for a piece of Wraith tech. This one appeared to grow out of the ground, and somewhere – at about waist height for a Wraith – was a panel, complete with organic keys.

“Oh, that is … disgusting. Cool, but disgusting,” he said. “It’s an organic computer. I bet if I touch it it feels meaty.”

He poked at one of the keys experimentally and shivered.

“It’s got a pulse.”

“Freaky,” said Sheppard.

Just then, a set of Wraith characters appeared on the panel.

“Oh. Huh.”

“What, McKay?” asked Sheppard.

“It says—okay. ‘ _The Wraith commander in the service of our Magnificent Queen has destroyed the dead world Sateda. Let it be known that I have released nine runners in punishment of those who would dare defy us when they have already lost.’_ ” He frowned. “I took some liberties with the phrasing.” He looked down at the screen again. “Oh, weird. It says ‘ _Four remain’_. I guess it’s like a game.”

“Just so, Rodney,” confirmed Teyla. “It is known that the Wraith sometimes take powerful warriors, or other people who have defied them, and release them only to draw out the hunt.”

“When was Sateda culled?”

“I am unsure. At least four years ago. Perhaps six. We believe it was culled twice. Once by chance, and once because the Wraith found that they had advanced at the time of the first cull.”

“Rodney, can you access the Wraith tracker network?”

“What? No, that’s a ridiculous question!” he said, because it _was_. Except, actually… “Oh, uh, maybe. I don’t know. I know which frequencies they use, or some of them anyway. Maybe. Why?” And then he realised: Sheppard wanted to find the runners. A noble goal, but not exactly helpful to them in terms of technology acquisitions. “Teyla, didn’t you say there were stories about people in ships? We should be wasting time on that, not this. They probably weren’t more advanced than the Hoffans, anyway.”

“If the Wraith are hunting them and they aren’t dead yet then they’re either good at hiding or good at killing Wraith,” said Sheppard. “And we want their help in either scenario.”

He took a look at the weird Wraith device.

“Can we take it back to Atlantis? Maybe it has the tracker data loaded onto it.”

“No, but I can… I’ll get its database, which should give us a last known location, maybe. Or I can pull the frequencies, I guess. If that’s what it’s even for.”

“Do it.”

So he did – despite the fact that he thought they’d be better off looking for the guys _with spaceships_ (who admittedly might not even exist). When he was done he stood and started walking back to the puddlejumper.

“We have to get back to Atlantis fast, if this will be of any use,” he explained, and didn’t bother waiting for the others to catch up, since they’d get there eventually – it’s not like he’d suddenly developed a break-neck pace.

*

“We have to leave now!” said Gonos, tugging at his arm. “Come _on_!”

Botor breathed in deeply.

“I can’t. My ankle, Gonos… I think this is it, I’m done.”

Botor and Gonos had been runners together since the beginning. They’d stuck by each other despite the sense of going it alone – two targets were better than one, after all – and would until the end, but he thought that was coming now. He’d fallen and broken his ankle – a twist or a sprain he could deal with and just push through, but this was something else. The Wraith were already after them, and this time… this time he didn’t think he’d make it.

“Please go, Gonos. Leave me here. Get out alive.”

Gonos kissed him.

“I’m not leaving you here, Botor.”

They were as close to married as two men could get, but that didn’t even matter any more because Sateda was dead and there was nobody left to say ‘you can’t do that’. They’d spent eight years on the run together: that was more of a marriage than any he’d ever known, as far as he was concerned.

“I’m going to carry you.”

Botor nearly told him not to. It would slow him down and maybe kill the both of them – he wasn’t exactly a small man, after all, even if eight years as a runner had taken their toll on his once-powerful physique. Food was scarce, sometimes.

“Don’t carry me, just… help me walk. You can’t carry me. I’m too big. You should leave me here.”

Gonos was smaller than he was, and he simply couldn’t carry a man as large as Botor. Botor had done this many times for Gonos, who wasn’t and had never been a soldier. He was picked as a runner only because he was part of the Satedan High Command, and had probably only lived through it because they’d stuck together.

“Fuck off, Botor. You’ve never left me behind. I’m not leaving you.”

The Wraith had tracked them to a desolate world covered in violent sandstorms. It made them difficult to see, but that had never mattered to the Wraith – they had ways of tracking them that didn’t rely on sight.

During his time as a runner he’d killed more Wraith than he’d ever killed as a soldier. Wasn’t that something? His killcount probably numbered in the mid tens now, which was impressive when he had to make do with thrown together weapons and do-it-yourself bombs. They’d evaded the Wraith for almost a decade. Even if he died he’d make sure that Gonos survived.

Hidden within the vast desert was a secret Ancestral facility which somehow blocked the Wraith trackers. That’s where they were headed: it was a place they visited sparingly, since the Wraith could still track them to the planet and they didn’t want to risk an orbital bombardment. But for now? Botor needed to get there. He’d stashed three junk bombs and a gun there, not to mention medical supplies.

But how to get there when his ankle was broken and Gonos could barely carry him?

“Gonos.”

“I’m not leaving you, Botor. Stop saying it.”

Botor shook his head.

“That’s not what I meant. We have to get to the bunker.”

“Don’t you think I _know_ that? Fuck, that’s what I’m trying to _do_.”

Despite the dire situation he smiled. Gonos always got foul-mouthed when he was under pressure; it was endearing, even now. You had to enjoy the little things or otherwise… otherwise you weren’t living for anything at all, and they might as well just roll over and let the Wraith win.

“I know. Listen. We’re not that far, right?” He knew they weren’t far, but neither were the Wraith. “Get me my pistol. I’ll watch for Wraith if you focus on getting us safe, okay?”

Gonos nodded.

“Good. You’ll need to concentrate on holding me up. I’m a lot heavier than you are. If you get too tired we’ll stop.”

He knew that Gonos wouldn’t admit to being tired, at least not until they were in the bunker; Botor would have to watch for that himself, then, as well as for the Wraith. They could do this. They _had_ to do this. And if they couldn’t… well, he would have to find some way to ensure Gonos could go on without him.

 

*

Back on Atlantis Elizabeth had had exactly the reaction John knew she’d have, which was good because he hadn’t planned for her to have a different one. She was won over easily by his argument that they needed people who could kill Wraith, because it was a good argument – despite Rodney’s objection. Anyone who could outrun Wraith actively hunting him – or her – for multiple years was somebody he wanted on Atlantis, no questions asked. They weren’t getting reinforcements, and although they were training up the kids and the Athosians, it’d be way easier if they could get some actual veterans of real, organised armies to fight for them.

Because of their experience of course, but also because their lives on the run would have taught them all sorts of skills Earth would call ‘black ops’ skills. So he was happy Elizabeth had agreed with him.

“McKay. How are we coming with that Wraith beacon thingy?”

McKay had set up shop in the Atlantis control room because apparently he couldn’t patch into the Wraith communications frequency from his lab.

After a few moments John got a reply.

“Not well. The long range sensors are one of the systems the AIs got us locked out of, and Chuck—” said Rodney, shooting the man a death glare “—hasn’t managed to fix it yet. So that’s what I’ve been doing.”

He started fiddling with something again, but John wasn’t too caught up with the vagaries of Ancient technology so he had no idea what was going on.

“So… you’re not done yet, then,” he said.

“I didn’t say that,” said the dour man. “I said it’s not going _well_ , not that I haven’t done it. I can only pick up two of the trackers. The others must be out of range, or… dead”

“Two’s better than none,” said John, and shrugged. “Can’t you, I don’t know, boost the sensors or something?”

He hoped the other two runners hadn’t died in the time it had taken them to get this set up. That would suck.

“I barely have access as it is,” said McKay, “and you want me to start poking around? We don’t even know what the limitations of the technology are and you want me to potentially break a system _I only just got access to?_ ”

McKay made a disgusted sound and went back to doing whatever it was he was actually doing. John supposed that if anyone else spoke to him the way McKay did it’d bother him, but that was how he spoke to _everyone_ , with the possible exception of Elizabeth and Teyla (and even then, he wasn’t consistent).

“Let me know when you’ve got a gate address.”

“That shouldn’t take too long,” he said. “That’s what I’m doing now – the sensors can match the coordinates to a gate address logged in the dialling program.”

“Nifty.”

“It’s just too bad we’ve been locked out of the sensors until now,” said McKay, doing … something with a crystal. Why was he swapping crystals? “I bet we can pick up some useful frequencies, maybe even some Ancient stuff…”

“That’s what you’re doing with the crystals?”

“What?” He paused to look at John. “Oh, no – this is one of our crystals. It fits in Ancient stuff too but we use it for tech bridging and logs. Our Machines can do stuff with it.”

“Cool.”

It was pretty cool, even if the answer was vague and lacking anything like details – he had good old fashioned Earth tech down already, but crystals still felt really alien to him. How did they work? Why did they work? And why did seemingly every space-going species use them?

“I’m going to go,” said John. “See what Ford’s up to, I guess. Or Teyla.”

McKay waved him off idly, probably not actually paying any attention to what he’d said. John didn’t mind. He needed to get Teyla and Ford ready to leave ASAP, since runners didn’t stay put long – it was even in the name.

*

Sarana Lal had been a runner for eight years. She hadn’t thought she’d make it a week, let alone a whole eight years, but she had. She wasn’t a soldier, and had never been one; the Wraith had picked her because she’d managed to work out the principles of energy weapons after the first cull, and when the Wraith returned the Satedans had attacked them. She had been with the Satedan High Command when the Wraith had executed them, and they had selected her to be a runner.

But she’d hidden her latest prototype weapon in a secure location and had retrieved it as soon as she was able. It was nothing compared to Wraith weapons, but it required no ammunition and recharged using solar energy. It was hers, and it had kept her alive. She believed that firmly, completely: one could not survive as a runner for as long as she had without being steadfast in will and conviction.

It had been lonely at first, and difficult – she could not hunt, she didn’t know how to skin an animal. She didn’t even know what she didn’t know, for so long – but she had learned. That was key.

 _Always be aware_. That was what Jonos Threx had told her, before he was captured and killed by the Wraith hunting them. There were nine of them, once, but she didn’t know how many of them survived. She could be the last Satedan in existence.

The last of a people, and in a most precarious position. The world she called home – if she could call any world ‘home’, since the Wraith would soon come and try to kill her – was populated by terrifying creatures. She referred to it as Dragonworld because the creatures resembled that mythic creature, although most did not have wings and so couldn’t fly.

Small mercies. It was hardly a paradise, but it was far from other people and she only used it as one of her stores. She had five worlds where she kept supplies – scavenged or outright stolen parts for her gun, food, medical supplies… she even had a Genii gun hidden away – but Dragonworld was the most dangerous.

Great, fierce beasts roamed the plains. The skies were ruled by monstrous winged beasts, and the waters… Sarana had only ever set foot in them once, and had never done so again. She’d nearly lost a foot. Why the Ancestors had placed a Ring on this world was something Sarana couldn’t figure out, since it seemed hostile to everything, including itself. But coming here didn’t endanger anyone else, and that was important to her.

Runners brought devastation and desolation wherever they went. The Wraith would come and destroy everything, everyone, just to capture and kill the runners they’d sent out. The cull of Sateda had been a great moment for the Wraith commander – that was something Sarana understood clearly. She’d had nearly a decade to stew over it, and in that time she had become convinced that they had discovered something important. That was why the Wraith had released an, as far as she could tell, unprecedented number of runners.

But what?

She didn’t have time to think now: her cache was about a mile away, hidden away in a cave behind a waterfall. It was reasonably close to the Ring but not too close, since that would make it too easy for the Wraith to get her. Being deep underground sometimes confused the tracker they had planted in her – she knew it was there, but she couldn’t reach it to take it out herself and she didn’t stay anywhere long enough for them to do it.

And such an operation performed by primitive peoples would likely kill her, since many of the other worlds in Pegasus had no concept of germ theory or sanitation. Once she had visited a world where they might have been able to help, but immediately she had been forced back through the Ring to somewhere, anywhere, else.

Such was the life of a runner.

Sarana ducked under the waters and entered the small cave behind the waterfall. It smelled damp, which was to be expected. Dragonworld was hot and wet, even where there was no water. Insects the size of her arm buzzed about the skies, but beyond the waterfall was something of a sanctuary for her. It was cool, and she had access to clean water. And the pool beneath it was too small for anything nasty to lurk – it would be perfect if the Wraith hadn’t stuck a tracker in her.

She pulled out the bag of food she’d stashed three days ago and headed out, back towards the Ring. She couldn’t stay here too long or the Wraith would come, as they always came. She would have to be gone when they arrived.


	2. Chapter 2

Run. Kill Wraith. Run again. Kill Wraith. Run. That was all the experience Ronon Dex had managed to fill eight long years with, and it looked like that would be his life for as long as he could survive. He was Specialist Ronon Dex, and he was a Runner. That aspect of his life defined him now: he was not just a man, not just Ronon, not a being with desires and wants and hopes. He was a Runner. He Ran. Everything else was secondary.

He was maybe even the last Satedan, but nothing about his life defined him more than as a plaything of the Wraith. He fought them. He even killed them, though how he would have done so without finding a powerful energy weapon on the dead body of a strange man from no world he had ever visited he could not say.

There had been nine runners once. He still remembered their names: **Sarana Lal** , the scientist who had revolutionised Satedan weapons; **Botor Daskhu** , an explosives Specialist; **Gonos Ralor** , a member of the Satedan High Command; **Jonos Threx, Jalabar Vong, Doron Chell** and **Pamun Varr** , all high-ranking military/government complex officials. And of course, himself. **Ronon Dex**.

None of those people existed any more. Most were dead, probably, although he could not say for certain. But live or dead, they were not the same people they had been eight years ago. Those people had died with Sateda, and those who had been born after… they did not live either, precisely.

Runners brought death with them. Brought the Wraith. They _Ran_ , although that was in the name. But most didn’t stop to consider what it really meant to Run. Why should they? It was more than physical. He never stayed in one place too long or the Wraith would come. As much as he relished killing each and every Wraith he encountered, he was not a fool. Death would be a sweet reprieve, but for what? He lived so he could kill again, and again, and again.

He rarely spoke, these days. Most days he spent alone with his thoughts, churning about in his head. He was alone apart from them: his memories, his thoughts, his _self_. He felt that he knew himself now clearer than he ever had. But that self was shallow and animalistic: he knew it, saw it, _breathed_ it. The Wraith treated people like animals, made them live like animals.

And he killed them for it. Ronon Dex did not live for life itself. Ronon Dex lived to kill. To maim. To blow Wraith limb from limb, then run away to kill more Wraith. He didn’t know how many Wraith he had killed, truly. When they came he killed them; he did not hide. If he died he would die, but he would go down and take as many Wraith with him as humanly possible.

But that had yet to happen. Eight years. Eight years had honed his reflexes. Eight years had changed him from the man he was into the man he was _now_. There was only now. He spent his days and nights running, and when exhaustion forced sleep upon him he preferred to sleep in caves and hollows—places where the Wraith could not easily find him, although with tracker they’d put in him those places were few and far between.

The Wraith, in their arrogance, had turned him into an instrument of death. In moments the Wraith hunters would emerge from the forest, following the trail he had left which would eventually expose them. Then he would kill them, or they would kill him, and that would be the end of it.

*

“Say that again, McKay,” said Sheppard.

“AR-2 found evidence of one of the runners, and some dead Wraith, on the world I sent them to.” Rodney knew which thing Sheppard wanted him to repeat. He wouldn’t give him such an instant gratification; if he wanted to hear it again he’d have to work for it.

“No, the other bit. What evidence did they find?”

He knew that Teyla didn’t have any idea why the particular piece of information they wanted him to repeat was so interesting. It wasn’t, not really: it wasn’t a ZPM. It wasn’t a secret Wraith homeworld.

“A pack of velociraptors tore apart a Wraith patrol as a lone woman escaped through the Stargate.”

“ _Velociraptors!_ ” crowed Sheppard.

Rodney shrugged.

“They probably weren’t _actually_ velociraptors. Just related. Or similar.”

“Still cool.” He paused. “Did they get a gate address?”

“Mm,” he replied. “I matched it to one of the tracker frequencies – so I guess this world is where we’ll find our first Satedan. A girl Satedan.”

AR-1 hadn’t exactly had much downtime since they’d discovered the Wraith trackers and the runners who still remained. Rodney had spent quite some time patching the Expedition into the long range sensors, something which should have _already been done_ , and then they’d spent time briefing other teams and running all across the galaxy in search of people who could hide better than even the best Hide and Seek champion back on Earth.

Much of their time had been spent in the Gate Room, simply waiting until a runner was on one world long enough for them to track, get an address, and ship out. Thus far they hadn’t been able to find the pair of Satedans who travelled – their trackers had disappeared some time ago. Dead, maybe, Rodney thought, but maybe not since the dead trackers were all accounted for. These had simply disappeared.

“The Athosian information network has suggested that this woman must be Sarana Lal, a Satedan scientist,” added Teyla. “Only two women were released as runners from Sateda. That much is known. There are rumours of a female runner with a weapon no one has ever seen before. Sarana Lal is the most likely candidate.”

Suddenly, the Gate wooshed into action and Elizabeth’s voice came over the radio.

“AR-1, get ready. Bring us good news.”

“You heard the lady,” said Sheppard, setting off and disappearing beyond the event horizon. Rodney followed.

*

“We’re not in Kansas any more, that’s for sure,” said John, taking a moment to survey their surroundings. For as far as the eye could see, this planet was rocky and almost bare. Strange, almost pulsating, crystals grew from the bare rock, and the sky was overcast and grey.

An eerie silence blanketed the landscape. There were no birds, no sounds of animal life. The clouds had taken an almost violently purple tone.

“She came this way,” said Teyla. “Look.”

John turned to her voice. The footsteps of a single person led away from the Gate, too faint and too few to be a Wraith squad. They didn’t appear to lead anywhere in particular, although John knew that was unlikely. The runners probably had a number of gate addresses, worlds, which they rotated. It’s what he would do. The landscape was rocky and bare.

Sarana Lal, if it were actually her they pursued, would have some concrete reason for coming to this world.

“McKay?” he queried, although he wasn’t entirely sure what he was asking. Those glowing, pulsing, crystals might be something interesting. Or not: it was hard to tell, sometimes.

The often dour man wrinkled his nose and tapped away at his tablet.

“There are two sources of weird radiation,” he said. “The crystals in the ground, and whatever’s going on in the sky.” He looked up, briefly, and then frowned. “I don’t think that’s natural. It’s obviously normal, but it isn’t natural.”

“Ancients?” suggested Ford. “Some weird weather device?”

“That could explain the … state of this world,” agreed Teyla.

“Is it safe?” ‘Radiation’ rarely meant anything good, unless it was zero-point-energy radiation or whatever, because that would probably mean ZPMs.

McKay shrugged.

“Can’t say. It’s not something I’ve ever encountered before. Doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen… maybe some kind of quantum virtual interaction? I don’t…”

“Should we turn around and go home?” Sheppard said, rephrasing his question.

“No, no,” said McKay quickly. “The runner is here, and I’d like to see what’s up with this cluster of crystal-energy over there.” He pointed somewhere in the distance. “That’s probably where the Satedan is anyway. It’s the only thing of interest on this shit hole.”

Sheppard nodded.

“Lead the way, McKay. We’ll keep our eye on her tracks and let you know if they diverge.”

McKay nodded again and set off in the direction of the ‘cluster’ of energy.

Sheppard lingered a few moments, and shiver ran up his spine. Something about this world was off. He could feel it in his bones.

*

Sarana Lal had stumbled upon this planet, her greatest refuge, completely by accident. She had pressed the wrong glyph in the sequence and, not caring if she lived or died, stepped through the Ring. In a stroke of serendipity, she had ended up here. She hadn’t realised the boon for what it was at first, as this planet was strange and alien.

Covered in rock and strange plant life, pulsating crystals rose up out of the rocks. Overhead, violent purple clouds blocked out the sun and occasionally, a great thunderstorm raged across the whole of the planet. The planet itself nightmarish and desolate, a forgotten world of the Ancestors.

But the crystals kept the Wraith away. She had been able to learn much from the one piece of evidence of civilisation on the whole planet – a hidden installation not too far away from the Gate. The crystals of this world produced a kind of radiation which nullified the regenerative abilities of the Wraith. She could not read much of the Ancestral script, so she didn’t understand it fully, but this world was a refuge when she needed respite.

The Wraith would come. They always came. But on this world, this world which they had not destroyed with their Hives – though she assumed the Wraith were responsible for the sky, and the desolation all around the planet, rendering it almost uninhabitable – they were vulnerable.

The hunters would came clad in strange clothes, no doubt intended to shield them from the effects of the radiation. It didn’t matter. She would retrieve what she needed from the Ancestral facility and then circle back to the Ring, leaving until she needed this world again.

She couldn’t enter the facility through its door. She had tried, but each time it had failed to respond, and upon a closer investigation of its inner workings she had been baffled – crystals, not unlike the ones scattered around the planet, sat in sockets. Technology far beyond that of Sateda, despite the advances they had made.

But she had been lucky. Oh, how lucky she had been. What had once been a grand road, she assumed, connected the Ring of the Ancestors to the facility. A strange rock formation welled up from the ground halfway along the road, and here she had found a manual access route to the facility. It was through this ancient passageway she entered the facility each time, cursing whatever technological trick the Ancestors had used to prevent unintended access to their legacies.

Her clandestine and secure route to the facility did, however, take far longer to complete than the simple journey along the ancient road. The passage twisted and turned, in some places being entirely natural rock and in others the strange Ancestral metals.

Eventually, she found her way inside the facility, though not anywhere close to the main set of rooms. She had never been able to access them, and once inside, few of the systems responded to her. She had to manually access the lights, usually—except this time, the whole of the facility seemed alive in a way it had never been before.

The lights were lit. Everywhere. Screens which had before been entirely dark, their secrets hidden, now displayed all manner of things which she did not understand. Curious. Dangerous? Probably – perhaps the Wraith had finally gained access to the facility, which even they hesitated to destroy, its secrets too valuable.

Sarana made her way through the corridors and up the manual access shafts, traversing the space between the lower levels of the facility which housed sleeping areas, storage and whatnot, and the upper levels which she had never seen before. She was aware of the danger – if not Wraith, _someone_ had accessed the facility through the doors. Ancestors? Unlikely, but possible. Some other faction, one she had never met before? Most likely.

She grasped her gun. It would do her well. It always did.

*

At the end of the road – although Rodney wouldn’t want to call it a road really – they had found an Ancient facility of some kind. Someone had tampered with the control crystals in the door – they had been rearranged and put back into all sorts of _ridiculous_ places, so he assumed it had been someone without any understanding of crystal tech. The runner, probably. He’d had to put them right again, but almost as soon as he had the facility responded to the presence of ATA and opened its doors for them.

Inside wasn’t anything Rodney considered particularly interesting. The facility was identical to many he had seen before – workstations of an identical cast, screens and displays and systems he recognised. A research facility, then, and not a ZPM factory. He’d hoped – dared to hope – that there might be something interesting, power-generation-wise, here. The signs had seemed – not right, since he didn’t even know what an Ancient ZPM factory would look like – but promising at least.

“I want to go look at the computers, see what they were researching here,” he said, and opened the door into a large central chamber, off which a number of corridors and other rooms projected.

“What do you think the power source is?” said Sheppard, fingers dangerously close to an activation panel. “I wasn’t going to touch anything,” he protested after Rodney levelled a glare at him.

“If we’re lucky, a quarter-full ZPM. If we’re unlucky they’re drawing power from the crystals, the planet’s core, or the sky thing that’s going on.”

Sheppard casually moved about the room, and Rodney watched him carefully, his attention split between downloading the facility’s datalog to his tablet and babysitting Sheppard.

Not surprisingly, Sheppard reached out to touch the big central computer-thing, a cylindrical machine which sat at the centre of the room and looked almost like a table, if you squinted. Predictably it flared into function, and a hologram of a stern-looking Ancient woman appeared. She began to speak in Ancient, and Rodney scrambled to translate.

“Uh, she’s saying, something about their legacy, continuation of thought and rightful successors… okay, this bit is interesting,” he said. “’In this facility we sought to produce a perfect defence against the Wraith threat. The crystals of this world produce a radiation which neutralises the Wraith cells’ regenerative abilities. We sought to weaponise this phenomenon, but in the end we were unable.’”

Rodney stopped translating then, since the rest of it was about how the Wraith had ‘poisoned the sky’ and rendered the world uninhabitable, destroying most of the research facilities that dotted the planet’s surface.

“The Wraith did the sky thing,” he said. “I guess the radiation is why our runner comes here.”

“Anything we can use?” asked Sheppard.

Rodney shrugged. He didn’t know, yet. The Ancient seemed to think the project was a failure, but maybe there was something that could be done?

“We should look for a power source, though. The facility’s computer should be able to tell me what it is, so if you guys wanted to go look for the runner…”

Sheppard nodded.

“Ford, stick with McKay. Teyla, we’ll go look for Lal.”

Now in peace – with the exception of Ford, whose inane babbling he could filter out – Rodney set about figuring out how the facility was powered, as well as downloading anything he could about their research. Maybe they could adapt it.

*

Teyla wondered whether Sarana Lal would accept their help. Few people in Pegasus would open their arms to even a wounded runner, ever fearful of the Wraith. The Athosians had always given them food and sent them on their way, as runners could not be allowed to endanger the people of a community.

So the life of a runner was isolated and desperate, consisting of only snatches of tense and hurried conversation – if it could be called that. Such a strange and bleak existence, for it was surely not a life. But even so, that she had survived so long, and gained entry to a facility such as this, spoke volumes about the woman they sought. She was strong, and a survivor, and more than that she was capable of learning, of adaptation. If she could be saved she would be an asset to Atlantis—if indeed she wished to join the Expedition.

“That so many Ancestral installations remain functional after so long is truly a wonder,” she decided to say eventually, shaking the thoughts from her head. A mission was not the time for speculation or endless monologue.

“Mm,” agreed John. “They built to last, that’s for sure…” He paused. “Their whole civilisation flickered out of existence so long ago, but their machines and cities have outlasted entire peoples and worlds that have sprung up since they died off. It’s almost as if they thought they were going to last forever.”

An interesting thought, mused Teyla. Perhaps they had – everything she had learnt of the Ancestors painted them as a powerful and curious race, but things she had experienced with the Earthers showed them as arrogant and short-sighed in the most esoteric of ways.

“Lifesign this way,” said John, indicating a corridor to her left. She shifted her weapon and strode into the corridor, mindful that she may find a frightened and desperate woman at the other end.

“I have a gun,” said a shaky, hoarse female voice. “You’re not Wraith. Wraith don’t talk like that. If you come slowly around the corner, weapons lowered, I will not shoot you.”

“We are friends,” said Teyla, looking to John. She lowered her weapon but didn’t step around the corner just yet. John nodded, and she did so.

What she saw was a lean, wiry woman holding a strange gun. Her hair would have been pretty at another time, sleek and black, but was now cut short and jagged. She wore clothes that had been mended many times, and looked as if they had been nice, once. But the worst thing about her that Teyla could see were her eyes: frightened, nervous, almost dead inside. Haunted.

“Who are you? How did you gain access to this facility?”

“We’re the good guys. We know the Wraith made you a runner. We want to help,” said John, who had followed her. “We can take out the tracker.” He grinned, easy and casually, no doubt hoping to win her over with his charming face and slow, friendly, drawl. “Sarana Lal, isn’t it?”

“How did you know my name?” Sarana Lal frowned, shifting her weight uneasily.

“We are not Wraith worshippers, Sarana Lal of Sateda,” clarified Teyla. “You are … known, in Pegasus. I am Teyla Emmagan, of Athos, and this is my friend, Major John Sheppard of the Earthers. We can help you free yourself from this life.”

Teyla could not help but feel a torrent of emotion for the poor woman as the enormity of the decision she was about to make played out across her face. Accept help and be free – it should be simple, but Teyla knew it would not be. Sarana Lal didn’t understand their motives, didn’t know the context, couldn’t know any of these things.

“We should leave this world. The Wraith take longer to come here, but they’ll still come. Do you have somewhere safe we could perform the operation to remove my tracker?”

“We might,” said John. “Let’s get moving. We have people up top.”

*

Ronon Dex had been a runner long enough to know when he was being actively hunted. Most days, the Wraith only came if he remained in one place for any appreciable length of time. He knew how long it took for them to take interest. This was different. Something, someone, else was hunting him. He felt it in the tense coil of his muscles. He heard it in the snap of a twig, the rustling of the underbrush. He could feel it in his bones.

Each time he changed world they followed. They were tracking him like the Wraith, but were more diligent and apparently less effective. Thus far they hadn’t managed to keep up with him, and he hadn’t seen them. This time he’d waited for them, hunkered down on one world in a defensible position.

He would face whoever hunted him. These people weren’t Wraith. What could they possibly want?


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter took a while. Sorry! The next chapter should be much, much faster! I haven't lost interest in this saga and I intend to finish it the way I'd planned in the beginning. It's just taking a bit longer than I expected!

“I’m saying we _can’t go yet_ , not that we can’t go!” Rodney said for the third time. “I _know_ the Wraith will get here soon. I’m saying that I think there’s a ZPM here somewhere.”

“And _I’m_ saying we can come back for it later. We’re not splitting up. I’m not leaving you here. No unnecessary risks.” Rodney knew there were words left unspoken, memories of the recent past lurking just under the surface. He even knew that Sheppard was right. They could come back and look at another time. They could probably even pull up a database entry on the planet, once they got access.

He let it go. Compromise.

“Fine.”

AR-1 – and their new friend, Sarana Lal – exited the Ancient facility through its lower levels and used the hidden access shaft to return to the Gate. It took longer, but Rodney happily agreed to it because it was the far less exposed route back to the Gate. It turned out not to matter, since camped out at the Gate was a Wraith squad wearing some kind of Wraith environmental suit. They hadn’t been spotted yet, but…

“Sheppard,” he said quietly, “if you could get Beckett a Wraith and me one of those suits that would be great.”

“Gotcha,” said Sheppard. “Teyla, you need to get Ms Lal here safely to the Gate, where McKay will get ready to dial the Beta Site. Ford, we’re going to be the distraction. Maybe snag ourselves a Wraith.”

“If you damage their suits they will begin to panic,” suggested Lal helpfully. “Even the warrior drones. I can help clear the path to the Ring.”

Sheppard shook his head.

“No offence meant, but you’re the target. You can’t be the distraction because the mission is to get you through the Stargate and to safety.”

Sarana Lal shrugged. “As you would have it.”

Rodney watched as Sheppard and Ford charged on ahead, shooting and shouting and causing a distraction. Almost immediately the Wraith pursued, and Teyla and pushed through the remainder with a round of suppressive fire. Lal followed after her, taking careful and considered shots with her weird energy weapon – which Rodney decided he definitely wanted to look at, since it seemed effective at tearing holes through Wraith material.

He got to the DHD and hit the glyphs that would take him to the Beta Site – little more than a field tent where someone – maybe even Beckett – would be waiting to remove the Wraith tracker. The world was a burner.

Something exploded, and Rodney realised Ford must be flinging grenades around. He ushered Lal through the Gate and then crossed the event horizon himself.

*

“Is this her?” said Beckett. “Ah, it must be. I’m Doctor Beckett,” he said, all warm smiles and an offered hand. Such a physician. Rodney nodded to him.

“I am Sarana Lal. You can remove my tracking device?” she said, looking him up and down. She glanced at the wild, forested area around the Stargate. Rodney knew they’d set up a field tent some distance away, so without waiting for Sheppard and Ford to get back – they had to get the tracker out and deactivated, fast – the small group made their way to the makeshift field hospital.

Rodney waited outside and a short distance away from the field tent. He didn’t want to be there for the operation, not that he was too squeamish for it; it was a simple procedure and wouldn’t take too much time to finish, and apart from that he wanted to see Sheppard and Ford bring a live Wraith back through the Gate. They needed one, and he wanted one of those suits – who knew what the Wraith had stuck in them?

Eventually Ford stepped through the Stargate and, not long after, Sheppard followed—dragging an unconscious Wraith, complete with Wraith-designed environmental hazard suit.

“Presents,” he said, dropping the Wraith onto the ground. He glanced at Ford. “Get some Marines to do something with Petey.”

Rodney rolled his eyes. He’d named the Wraith Petey. Rodney moved in to get a closer look at the Wraith suit.

“I wonder if it’s organic, too,” he said, gingerly nudging at the stunned Wraith with his foot. “How’d you put him out?”

Sheppard frowned.

“Crushed half his skull and scooped out half the brain. Beckett said if we avoid the weird hard yellow bit, that kind of damage isn’t lethal to Wraith. He’ll be walking again in two, three hours, tops.”

Rodney looked. Sure enough, half the Wraith’s skull was missing and its brains looked—interesting, to say the least.

“Wraith just won’t stay dead, will they?”

“Beckett said whatever wakes up won’t be the one that went down. We’re going to get basically a cabbage back from this one.”

“You did take half its brain out.” Rodney straightened.

Sheppard began to walk in the direction of their base camp, but then stopped and turned back to Rodney.

“Oh, I forgot – catch,” he said, and tossed Rodney a sturdy looking Wraith device. “It’s a Wraith cell phone, or something.”

And then he carried on walking away, leaving Rodney alone with his new Wraith toy.

*

For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, Sarana Lal was free. Her saviours had packed up their camp and then left through the Ancestral Ring, and it was only when she stepped out into a magnificent and beautiful city that she truly realised—she was free.

The Wraith would not come. Or, that was not quite correct. The Wraith would come eventually, but they would not come to hunt _her_. It would not be _she_ they hunted but humans in the abstract.

“Where am I? What sort of city is this?” she said, marvelling at the lines and colours, the materials and shapes which all bore striking resemblance to the examples of Ancestral architecture she had seen. “Are you the Ancestors?”

The tall, handsome man—the Major—smiled at her and shook his head.

“Nope. We’re humans, just like you. This is Atlantis, city of the Ancients, and we’re… explorers who found the city. We’re taking you to meet our leader, Doctor Elizabeth Weir.”

“Is that my name I hear, John?” said a feminine voice from somewhere above. She turned her gaze to an elegant staircase, upon which a thin, tired-looking woman stood.

“Yes it is. Doctor Weir, I’d like you to meet Sarana Lal, of Sateda. Sarana Lal, Doctor Elizabeth Weir.”

The woman nodded.

“Please, call me Elizabeth. Ms. Lal – may I call you Sarana? – if you would like to follow me to the briefing room we have much to discuss. If you are not too tired or hungry?”

“We can talk now, if there is to be food and a bed later,” Sarana decided to say. These people had given her aid when she needed it, and seemed confident or secure in their safety. What could she offer them? What would they ask of her? It would be better to get the unpleasantness dispensed with now, so that any relationship that ensued could proceed in good faith.

“You me call me Sarana, as well,” she said, and ascended the staircase. Her saviours followed after her—she had not been told specifically, but it was clear that the people she had met occupied a leading position in whatever hierarchy existed here. Teyla of Athos was interesting: Athos she knew, ‘Earthers’ she did not. Mixed in with the Earthers, who wore synthetic clothes and clearly hailed from a world with significant industrial and manufacturing capabilities, were those she assumed to be Athosians or native from less-advanced Pegasus cultures. Sateda had been something of an outlier, as far as she knew – save Hoff, Telornis and a handful of others.

Telornis had fallen before Sateda. Did Hoff stand? Echoht-bal? She could not say.

Did they present themselves as friends, and then behave as conquerors—their sphere of influence growing ever larger as more and more people became corralled into achieving their goals? Did it matter, now that they had freed her from the Wraith?

Along the way to the briefing room they passed a strange mechanical device.

_“Please don’t hurt me. I don’t want to kill you.”_

A strange, metallic voice emanated from the device, and Sarana assumed it was some kind of automated weapon. It appeared Earther, rather than Ancestral – it had a smaller, less monumental aesthetic for one thing, but it also didn’t appear crafted out of the Ancestral metals and had been designed by someone with a different set of sensibilities. Interesting.

The briefing room was strange to Sarana’s eyes and sensibilities. She found the room to be cramped, filled by its octagonal table and machines arrayed about the room. Elizabeth had sat at the centre, flanked by Major John and Doctor McKay. Next to McKay sat Beckett, and next to him an empty space. Alongside Major John sat the young soldier, Ford. Sarana took what she assumed to be her place—the seat opposite their leader, Elizabeth. Doctor Weir.

“Welcome to Atlantis,” said Elizabeth warmly. “Thank you very much, Doctor Beckett, for removing the Wraith tracking device. The operation went well, I trust?”

Doctor Beckett replied affirmatively, and Elizabeth continued.

“I am going to be frank with you, Sarana. I believe you deserve to know the truth, given all that you have experienced, and what we are about to ask.”

“I see.” She inclined her head. Continue.

“We are an expedition from a very distant world, one far beyond Pegasus and the threat of the Wraith. You’re thinking, ‘why don’t we go back there?’ We can’t.” Elizabeth smiled as she said the words, but it was not a happy smile. “We’re stuck here, for good or for ill. We came here because those you call the Ancestors, whom we call the Ancients, _are_ our Ancestors. Eons ago they colonised our galaxy, the Milky Way, and forged a vast empire. Then, they came to Pegasus fleeing a great epidemic. This city, Atlantis, fled from our planet, Earth. Then, fleeing the Wraith, the Ancients returned.”

She gave Sarana a dry, almost amused, look.

“Then their luck run out and their physical, living, society faded from existence. But before that, they took something of an active interest in us, whose evolution they had guided. We came here fleeing a great enemy in our own galaxy, in search of weapons and a new way of fighting, of new information and knowledge—and, failing that, to preserve what we can of our people.”

Poor fuckers, thought Sarana. They’d come fleeing an enemy and ended up here, where the Wraith dominated everything? Following in the footsteps of the Ancestors themselves. Their command of the ancient technologies made more sense in light of recent information.

“Your connection to the Ancestors is the reason you have brought this city to life, isn’t it?”

Sarana was sure however that they would have significant capabilities of their own, to have come here in search of weapons. A legacy of the Ancestors, such as this? Technology of their own devising, certainly. These people seemed confident, sure, even though the tale told by Elizabeth was not a nice one.

“Some of us,” agreed the Major casually.

“Why did you decide to liberate me, if I may ask?”

“Because it was the right thing to do,” said Major John firmly. “We were searching Sateda for—anything, and we found the Wraith device. Rodney—Doctor McKay—was able to pinpoint the locations of the four remaining trackers. But you knew that already.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Elizabeth. “It was the right thing to do. We stand by our decision. But we would be interested in you joining our Expedition in any capacity which you feel comfortable.”

Sarana had expected something of the sort, though not anything as flexible as _any_ capacity in which she felt comfortable. Though—what did she feel comfortable doing, exactly?

“I was a scientist before I was a runner,” she said. “But I think your expertise in that area would dwarf mine,” she continued, glancing around the room.

“Even before we found the Stargate we were more advanced than Sateda,” said Doctor McKay. It didn’t sound boastful, not entirely. More of a statement of fact, a self-evident truth akin to a statement that the Ancestors had been more advanced. She could see that. “But you’ve got the right sort of brain for it, and training already. You built your own energy weapon.” He paused. “And you probably don’t already think you know everything you need to know, so that’s a bonus.”

“’If there is one thing which I know better than anyone else, it is that I do not know anything at all,’” said Sarana, quoting a once-famous Satedan philosopher. Now he was dead, her people were dead, and she was the living receptacle of Satedan culture and knowledge.

There were nods of recognition at her words, so Sarana assumed that it was a common truth for many peoples. She expected that even the Ancestors would have a variant.

“We’d like it if you’d help us finding the other runners,” said Major John.

“We appreciate that field work may be … difficult for you,” said Teyla, speaking for the first time. “But we believe that your presence would be helpful in building trust with the others. We intend to remove the trackers from you all.”

“I will help. And then… I should like to join your Expedition. I think there is no other place I would be as content.”

She didn’t know what her role would be. She wasn’t used to thinking that far ahead, or thinking that went much beyond her next meal or how to escape the Wraith. She would need to learn those things again, those things and many other things, but she knew that they would come in time.

“Then we should get some lunch,” said Major John, looking down at his watch.

*

“Someone’s tracking us.”

Gonos shrugged. Wasn’t someone always tracking them?

“Not Wraith. Someone else.”

“How can you tell?” That caught his attention – why would anyone who wasn’t a Wraith track runners?

“They’re not trying to hide. They’ve tracked us across three worlds now. I waited until now to tell you.”

Gonos frowned.

“Why now?”

Botor kissed him.

“Because this time they’re going to catch up to us.”

Gonos pulled away immediately.

“That’s not a very good idea.”

“It’s the best idea, I think,” countered Botor. “I just don’t think they can be Wraith. Wraith don’t hunt the same way. You know I’m right.”

Gonos considered it. Wraith sometimes drew out the chase and sometimes ambushed; their pursuers hadn’t been as swift, as good at navigating rough terrain, and hadn’t come with any darts. Wraith always brought darts.

“I haven’t seen any darts,” he offered.

“Neither have I,” confirmed Botor. “That’s why we need them to catch up to us.”

“How’s it going to work? What if they want to kill us?”

“Won’t happen,” said Botor confidently. “We’ve prepared the ground. I don’t think they want to kill us anyway: why bother chasing us so far if they just wanted us dead?”

“You can do more things to a person than murder, Botor. There are fates _worse_ than death.”

“I know that,” he said, and then he shrugged. “But we… what if this is our only chance? What if they want to help? I think we should let them catch up to us. I’m hurt and the Wraith have been hunting us for way, way too long. You know that too.”

Gonos knew that Botor was right. He knew that their pursuers at the very least didn’t _seem_ to want to hurt them – they’d never fired their weapons, if they had any, and they weren’t hunting with darts or airborne weaponry. They were advanced enough to track them using the Wraith trackers – or so Gonos assumed; he wasn’t as good at this kind of thing as Botor, but even he knew that it was difficult to track someone across worlds without either seeing the Ring code or tracking in another way.

And yet each time they changed world their trackers followed. The Wraith always came of course, but so too did their new hunters. Hunters who made noise and talked. Hunters who perhaps were not _hunting_ but merely _tracking?_

Could he bring himself to hope that, after so long, someone only wished to help them? It seemed too good to be true. Nobody helped runners. Nobody except Wraith worshippers, anyway – and then only to come into contact with the objects of their veneration.

As bad as being caught by Wraith would be, Wraith-worshippers would only be somewhat better. The Wraith would always come.

He voiced his concerns.

“What if they’re Wraith worshippers?”

“They could be that,” agreed Botor. “But anything or anyone could be anything or anyone, you know that as well as I do. We can’t trust anyone except each other. Do you trust me when I say I don’t think these people are Wraith?”

Gonos trusted Botor implicitly, of course. There were things where Botor lacked the understanding or knowledge Gonos had acquired, but even in those cases, Gonos would trust that Botor would never, ever do something knowingly that would hurt him. There were some matters in which Botor had no experience and held no expertise, and in those situations Gonos would _still_ trust the other man to make the best choice, given the knowledge that he had – if Gonos himself were unable to make the choice, of course.

They were a team. That was why they had succeeded. Where Gonos would fail – in the physical things, in the science of war – Botor would succeed. Gonos knew things that Botor didn’t, bits and pieces of knowledge, modes of thought and philosophy, odds and ends of parts of science.

“Let’s do this, then,” Gonos said eventually. “Let’s make some friends.”


	4. Chapter 4

“Don’t you think it’s a bit optimistic to suggest we’re going to get them all?” whispered Rodney to Sheppard, ostensibly moving in to steal some of his chicken-like-thing (which he was actually trying to steal). It was impolite to talk about guests openly in front of them, especially when one was suggesting the last remnants of their culture might not live.

“We didn’t get them all. Five of them are dead,” he said, easily fending off Rodney’s fork with a swat of his hand.

Rodney frowned. The first five obviously didn’t count. The four they had _left_ to save counted, and they were being relentlessly pursued by bored Wraith. He supposed that the remaining runners represented the elite, the people who had been able to adapt to their new lives and survive. If anyone had a chance at surviving it was these people, and now that they _knew_ runners even existed they could at least have a chance to intervene.

He dared a glance at Sarana, who appeared intensely uncomfortable at her most recent ordeal – a friendly, casual lunch with other humans. She still had her gun with her, and Rodney hadn’t been able to pry it away long enough to get a look at it. No doubt it would be primitive and useless to them in its current state, but he thought he could maybe tease something useful out of it. Solar panels weren’t ZPMs, but then – he didn’t want to ever see the handgun that _needed_ a ZPM.

Oh, except now he _did_. Maybe some kind of hand-held wormhole gun?

“What are you thinking about, McKay?” asked Sheppard, a dubious kind of look on his face.

“What sort of gun I could make that would require a ZPM power source,” he said honestly, and then returned to eating his alien chicken. It was pretty good, despite how it had looked when it was alive – like if you crossed a chicken with a skunk, and then back to a velociraptor – and he was considering attempting another invasion of Sheppard’s plate.

The other man always took so long to eat. It was all the talking and fidgeting with his hands.

Oh, now, that was interesting, wasn’t it? thought Rodney, not failing to catch the way Lal’s eyes lit up at the talk of hardware. He pursued it despite Sheppard’s wary gaze.

“ZPMs are the Ancestral power modules?” said Lal awkwardly, the words seeming unsure. He nodded, and she continued. “It would be useless in a _weapon_ of such size.”

Well, she was observant, wasn’t she? He doubted Sheppard even had picked up on that – Ford would have been distracted by daydreams of massive explosions and destructive power orders of magnitude larger than anything humans had ever detonated, but Sheppard would have started calculating all sorts of things about the power it would provide, the distance, all sorts of useless things like that.

Both of them missed the sheer _absurdity_ of actually incorporating such massive power into a hand-held personal weapon. ZPMs weren’t designed for that purpose. ZPMs powered cities and intergalactic wormholes, and other, more niche, things.

“I was thinking about a wormhole gun,” he said. “You know, a gun that fires Stargate event horizons, basically.” He could bring himself to explain what he said to Lal, at least, because his explanations would _mean_ something to her; she merely lacked knowledge. Sheppard’s problem was bare-faced obstinacy, because even though he could access the requisite knowledge and had the right sort of mind, he delighted in pretending even to Rodney, who knew better, that he was nothing more than a handsome idiot.

Ford didn’t have the brain, and Teyla lacked the inclination or even the basic academic foundation if not the intellect, but Lal had both the brain, the desire to use it, and the sort of education where both of those things could be of any use. He could use her, honestly: half the idiots under his command were only idiots because they still thought like pre-Stargate Program scientists. Lal had already internalised the fact that most of her dearly held convictions and truths were wrong, but that it was okay because _that was the first step_ to getting the right ones.

“You could build such a thing?” she murmured, looking down to where he gun hung from her waist.

“I know for a fact that he couldn’t,” said Sheppard cheerfully. “Not yet, anyway.”

Rodney scowled at him and stole a piece of his alien chicken whilst the other man grinned smugly at Sarana.

“I’d have to understand the math behind the Stargate first,” he said, and shrugged. “Not even me and _Sam Carter_ , given all the money in the world, would be able to reverse engineer a regular Stargate.”

Well… he supposed they might manage it in a pinch, but he wouldn’t bet his life on it. The Tollans had needed help from the Nox, even.

“Although,” he continued, “I bet if Thor sat down with us we might be able to work something out.” Not like that would ever happen anyway, since the Asgard regarded humans as ‘too young’ and ‘too inexperienced’ for a more collaborative relationship.

“Now I am lost,” said Sarana.

“As am I,” said Teyla quickly. “It is a feeling you must swiftly become used to, I am afraid. The Earthers know many interesting things.”

“Thor’s a friend of Sam Carter, a scientist back on our homeworld who figured out how to make the ‘Gate network run again,” said Sheppard. “We, uh, forgot it existed for a few thousand years. She blew up a sun.”

Rodney rolled his eyes. So what, big deal, who _couldn’t_ blow up a sun (in theory)?

“Most impressive,” said Lal. “What did it do to offend her?” Her mouth twisted into an odd sort of grimace, so Rodney supposed it was meant to be a light-hearted joke. He smiled awkwardly at her.

Well, nobody said _he_ had to be good at social interaction, had they? Lal had an excuse, but Rodney was just Rodney.

“My point was,” Rodney continued, “nobody could _actually_ build a wormhole gun. I don’t think the Ancients were even there yet anyway. We’ve seen supergates, orbital space gates, analogue and digital gates, and that one minigate, but never a wormhole gun. I don’t even know if it’s theoretically possible, just that it would be _extremely_ cool.”

Not _everything_ he thought about was necessarily possible, probable, or even useful, after all.

“Do you have many of these ZPMs?” she said, testing out the word. Rodney noticed she’d copied his usage of it, not the others’ – ‘zeePMs’ indeed.

Sheppard snorted.

“We don’t have anywhere _near_ enough,” Sheppard said warmly. “That’s part of why we’re here, really. Used up the last bit of juice in our old one just to get us here.”

“Psych and cultural anthropology will get you up to speed,” continued Sheppard. “There’s a lot of stuff you’ll need to know. But you should know that we came here running from something _as bad_ as the Wraith. We’re Earth’s last-ditch attempt at survival, just in case things go wrong.”

“Our home planet is under siege,” explained Rodney. “So we came here to look for weapons and energy sources, but if we can’t find them are orders are just to stay here. Forever.”

“And you are able to match this enemy militarily?” asked Lal.

Rodney wasn’t simply telling her these things because she needed to know them. More important was the sort of question asked by Lal. The information she asked for would go a long way in helping Rodney to determine how smart the other woman actually was – IQ tests were almost pointless back on Earth anyway, so administering one to an alien human with a completely different cultural context would be _completely_ pointless.

The damned things had trouble with humans from non-Western cultures, after all.

“No,” he said. “We’re outnumbered, outgunned, and don’t have the industrial capacity the Goa’uld have. We’ve got one planet. They have… nobody even knows how many Goa’uld planets are. But we’re capable of _not getting conquered_ , at least for a little while.”

“Your world must house many people,” said Lal simply, “or it would not be possible to stand for so long. Our galaxy’s greatest weakness is how few of us there truly are, spread between so many worlds.” She paused. “There was a concept on Sateda which referred to the number of people required in any society before that society would enter a process of runaway, rapid, and exponential, technological and scientific progress. A critical mass of population and material wealth. No world we have studied has reached this population in centuries. And so, there are none capable of combating the Wraith in this galaxy.”

“Perceptive,” murmured Rodney, just loud enough for Sheppard to hear. The other man raised an eyebrow as if to say, ‘What are you up to, McKay?’

“Well, we managed it. Last estimates of population size on Earth came back at about 7.5 _billion_ people. There are other planets in the Milky Way with way more than us – when we arrived on the intragalactic scene we were primitives. But there are just _more_ Goa’uld than there are Wraith, and the Goa’uld… well, they don’t eat people. They _possess_ them.”

Lal grimaced.

“Truly? That is concerning… So unlike the Wraith, who must cull their vast herds, these Goa’uld wish to maintain breeding stock in huge numbers? I am sorry you chose to come here,” she said. “It was not much of a change for the better.”

“You can say that again,” said Ford.

*

Botor had been too injured to serve as the bait in their trap. Gonos felt that it was a bit much to call it ‘their trap’, since in truth they would be outnumbered, outgunned, and vulnerable to death. But Botor had never lost his sense of trust – it had been changed, twisted, and damaged – but it remained there.

He supposed that he wouldn’t love the man if he hadn’t; it was part of him. The trust he placed in others and the trust others placed in him. If Botor truly believed those hunting them were neither Wraith nor Wraith worshippers then Gonos would participate in the plan.

It was their only plan which even had the barest potential for freeing them from the Wraith, so Gonos supposed it was a good plan when all things were considered. They’d had a good run – possibly the best Run ever, although he doubted anyone took stats on that (except maybe the Wraith) – and now it was time to try something else, something different, no matter if it might result in their death.

It was a chance to _stop running_ , possibly. It could be something else entirely. It could be the best trap ever set for them by the Wraith. But when something different, something novel, occurred, sometimes the best response was to meet it in a manner different to the usual. Sometimes, what had worked previously simply wouldn’t work on something new. It was easy as a runner to become used to a pattern, to a sequence of events which would never change. It was even essential to do so because there wasn’t enough time for planning and deliberation – the Wraith came, and you either did what was necessary to survive or you didn’t. Often the steps required were identical to those required the previous time, and the time before that, and the time before that.

He knew, abstractly, that he was attempting to calm himself down. After all, there he was sat in the middle of a forest clearing, the only thing protecting him some mines they’d put in the ground a week ago, _waiting_ for the people hunting them to find him.

He didn’t think it would take them long, really. They seemed able to track them through the same methods the Wraith used – the damned trackers embedded into their flesh, too deep to gouge out without doing significant long-term damage. But there hadn’t been any nightmares – waking nightmares, since sleeping nightmares came without the Wraith – in days.

So Gonos merely waited. He knew Botor was watching, waiting, with the sniper rifle they’d stolen from some Genii a while back. At the very least, Gonos knew, if he was taken out he wouldn’t go out _alone_. That was a comfort even if he knew, somewhere in the back of his head, that it shouldn’t be, not really.

He had a gun of his own of course, and he knew how to use it. He just didn’t think it would be of much use against opponents with superior weaponry, numbers and training. It was merely a matter of waiting, and Gonos had been waiting for quite some time already.

He was beginning to worry that the Wraith would arrive, because the Wraith always came – but perhaps their pursuers could fight the Wraith. Who else would bother tracking runners? Who else had the capability? Not the Satedans. Not the Hoffans.

“Sir! We’ve found them!” shouted a human voice from beyond the treeline, obviously making no attempt to remain unheard.

“Don’t run this time!” shouted another, more forceful, man. “We’re here to help.”

He wasn’t going to run. The point was for them to find him, after all, but they didn’t know that. They couldn’t know that.

After a few moments a stern looking man emerged from the trees, flanked by three other man brandishing strange – but obviously advanced – guns.

“I’m Sergeant Bates,” said the man who was obviously in charge. “You must be Satedan. Where’s your friend?”

“Somewhere hidden,” replied Gonos. He got up from where he had been sat; it was rude not to stand when meeting a new person, but apart from that he felt too vulnerable. He extended his hand to Sergeant Bates, who shook it firmly.

“We want to extract you from this world,” he said. “Immediately. The Wraith won’t be far behind us. You know we’ve tracked you across nine planets?”

He hadn’t known it had been _nine_ planets. These people were relentless.

“I am Gonos Ralor. My … companion is Botor Dashku.”

Gonos turned around to signal Botor. They would have to retrieve him, given his injury, but he wanted to signal that everything was going okay. He almost couldn’t believe it, actually – that someone had actually been pursuing them in order to help them, even though they knew what runners were.

“We’ll have to retrieve Botor. He’s injured,” Gonos explained.

Bates nodded.

“Show me the way.”

*

“ _Atlantis! This is Bates. Requesting back up. Two ‘jumpers at least. A mega turret if you can swing it.”_ He paused. _“Some regular turrets, too.”_

A round of weapons fire coupled with the sound of explosions came over the PA.

_“And maybe a nuke.”_

The Stargate disconnected, and the Atlantis control room erupted into a flurry of activity and noise.

Sheppard sighed.

“Looks like we’re up,” he said cheerfully, glancing around at the other members of his team. “Do we have a mega turret available?”

Rodney shook his head.

“Nope. I think we might have a ha’tak beam weapon laying around somewhere; I’ll check.” He pulled out a tablet device and started tapping at it quickly. “It’s in storage, but I’ve sent the memo to get it out, fast.”

“Ah! Major Sheppard,” said Elizabeth, appearing in the control hub, no doubt brought there by Bates’s request for assistance. “When can you leave?”

“Right now.”

His entire team had been ‘on call’ and ready to move since they’d located the runners. That meant guns, combat gear, and mission readiness basically all the time.

“Can we spare one of our warheads?” she asked.

“I’m not sure Bates would have asked for one if he didn’t think we might need it,” said Sheppard uncertainly, “but… we don’t have many left.”

“Try to avoid using it, then,” she said.

“No problems there,” he agreed. “We should get going.”

Lal was, fortunately, safe and sound in the medical wing – she’d probably be tempted to come and help out her people, but they’d risked so much finding her that they couldn’t risk losing her on the day of her arrival.

The journey from the control room to the jumper bay was swift, and soon enough the gate wooshed open.

“Everyone ready?” he said, scanning the jumper. Nobody indicated otherwise so he shot off through the gate.

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” said Rodney.

“You can say that again,” muttered Sheppard.

In orbit above the planet – an uninhabited, unimportant, basically desolate wasteland – was a Wraith Hive ship.

Maybe they’d need that nuke after all.


	5. Chapter 5

Ronon Dex wasn’t quite what the Satedan head doctors would call ‘suicidal’: he didn’t _want_ to die, he just didn’t care so much if he did, not if he took some Wraith out with him when he went.

So he didn’t mind too much that he was probably about to die. He’d died the day he’d been made a runner, really, though he hadn’t realised it until much, much later. No, he was supremely pissed off that he was about to die a useless death, a useless death which _hadn’t been his fault_.

Along with the Wraith a group of _humans_ had been tracking them, and these people had ambushed him whilst running from a pack of Wraith. The Wraith had caught them all, and trapped them aboard their Hive ship.

The humans carried with them mass-produced weapons and wore synthetic fabrics. A highly advanced industrial society. He knew what that meant: a world like Sateda, maybe even more advanced considering their ordnance, though not so advanced as the Wraith.

“We’ll get out,” said the leader of the strange people – the Earthers, one had said. “Our people will extract us.”

Arrogant. Naïve.

Ronon said nothing. They had given him their names: Sergeant Wilson, the leader. Lieutenant Frost, the only woman. Tarann of Athos. Janus, a child. He hadn’t given them his but they had known it anyway; that had been curious.

“Others of your people still live,” said the Athosian man, Tarann, quietly. “We are extracting them.”

Ronon opened his mouth to speak, but then closed it and nodded to the man. That was… good news, he decided, if these people succeeded.

So far he hadn’t seen much that impressed him.

“We don’t leave people behind,” said Frost. “Not our way.”

“ _If_ they know we’re here,” muttered Wilson. “Look, we need to get out of this cell,” he said, looking around the moist and fleshy compartment. “If we can crash the ship on the planet…”

“The ground extraction teams can stick a nuke in it and make it go boom,” finished Frost grimly. Ronon didn’t know what a nuke was but assumed it was something spectacular, if it could blow up a Wraith Hive.

“That’s assuming the Wraith have taken us to where the last two runners are,” said Wilson. He took a breath. “We could be off, you know. They might not have taken a Hive to the planet, Bates and his team might not be there, and there might not be any reinforcements coming through the ‘Gate.”

Frost shrugged.

“Sir, this is literally my job.”

“I knew the risks,” said Tarann. “We all knew.”

“I should be dead already,” said Janus.

They all turned to look at him.

He shrugged.

“Destroying a Hive is a good way to die,” he said eventually. Ronon had no idea what a nuke was, but he assumed it was some kind of advanced explosive device. It would have to be, if they thought it could take out a Hive ship, and he wanted to see that. As far as he knew, only Wraith had been capable of that in the last however many thousands of years.

If the Earthers could do that, then, well, maybe his death would be worth it after all.

*

Rodney had had the dubious honour of being dropped off at the Stargate to set up and control the ha’tak beam weapon they’d brought in for anti-air defence. He’d known this would be his job, obviously – he wasn’t an idiot – but it was rather more annoying when one considered the aerial dogfight going on all around him.

The beam weapon wasn’t exactly ready to fire. It wasn’t even what Rodney would call ‘assembled’: ha’taks weren’t modular and the beam weapon wasn’t extricated easily. It had required some on-site reassembly, and for that Rodney only had Teyla.

Teyla was fantastic. Teyla was powerful. Teyla was hot. But Teyla wasn’t an engineer, nor a mechanic, and nor could she concentrate completely on the task because her other job was to prevent either herself or Rodney from getting killed.

So there was that. At least the assembly was pretty much done – all that was left was to patch in the Machine software…

Rodney tinkered with the crystals. They’d built a special crystal-Machine interface crystal, but it was always tricky to place… There, he’d done it. The only thing left was the Machine patch which Zelenka had promised them would be ready when necessary. Thus far, it hadn’t been, and Rodney didn’t want another Children’s Massacre on his hands.

“Zelenka!” he snapped.

“ _McKay.”_

“Can you upload the Machine software patch for dart recognition yet? Or are you _still_ not done?”

“ _It… it can be done now_ ,” replied the other man. “ _Two moments.”_

Like they had _time_ for two moments, but if that’s what it took…

 _“_ McKay out,”he said, as soon as the patch had uploaded. He hit the ‘on’ switch (literally a big red button: it had been Marine-proofed) and the big, gaudy barrel of the beam weapon swung violently around to fire a series of shots at a Wraith dart. It whirled around to fire pulse after pulse at the swarming wraith darts, missing only about 28% of the time (if Rodney had done the math right). He could call that success, and would.

The term ‘blown to smithereens’ came to mind immediately for Rodney, who snickered, and turned to face Teyla.

“We’re safe from air attack… for now.” He glanced around. “Ground forces, though…”

“Back to back at the Machine panel,” said Teyla, turning away from him, gun at the ready. Rodney scrambled to copy her, resting his back against hers. They had to defend this area from the Wraith – they hadn’t been able to get the Machines to target Wraith consistently over humans – that would come on foot as well as in the air, whilst Sheppard did what Sheppard did.

Like nearly dying.

*

For aircraft with such a completely non-aerodynamic shape the puddlejumpers could _move_ , and pull off manoeuvres Sheppard could only dream about doing in Earth fighters. They had to distract the Hive, mostly, and that meant _not getting hit_. That would be much, much easier if he didn’t have to dodge darts, Hive weapons, _and_ the Goa’uld beam weapon which kept knocking darts out of the air. The thing was damned effective, but that actually made it harder for him to avoid.

Jumper Two was doing the same thing, but Jumper Three… well, John was trying not to think about Jumper Three. Jumper Three had been sent to extract Bates’s team and the two runners, but was reliant entirely upon distractions by One and Two to complete that goal.

Three Jumpers and a Goa’uld beam weapon against _fuck knew_ how many Wraith darts and an entire Hive.

“We need a bigger spaceship,” he growled, slamming the jumper into an awkward – still flawlessly executed – angle to avoid the _fucking_ ha’tak beam weapon, which careened into the pursuing dart.

_“McKay, watch that fucking beam! You nearly cut us in half.”_

Gunfire came over the system.

“ _There’s no patch for that,”_ came McKay’s reply after what seemed like forever. “ _And we’re busy.”_

“Shit,” he said aloud, to no one in particular, although he supposed Ford could answer if he wanted to.

“Change of plans.”

He spun the jumper around and shot off in the direction of the Stargate. With luck, the darts would follow and he could use the beam weapon’s bugginess to his advantage. That, and a solitary Ancient drone could do a fuck ton of damage to ground troops…

*

Botor Dashku couldn’t believe his eyes. Nor could he believe his ears, or even his nose. An honest-to-Ancestors _aerial dogfight_ was happening in the skies all around him. Swarms of Wraith darts met with a much smaller number of strange cylindrical ships which practically danced through the sky. Despite the numbers disadvantage, from what Botor could see none of the Earth ships had fallen and yet Wraith craft dropped readily from the sky.

On the ground, teams of men and women like the one which had saved them went into battle against the (admittedly small) Wraith ground force.

It was war, if on a small scale, and Botor couldn’t do the one thing he was _born_ to do: fight. Instead, he and his husband, Gonos, were being escorted through the woods towards the Stargate in an attempt to rescue them from their lives as Runners.

Truth be told, Botor didn’t feel much like a Runner at that moment. What he felt was the blood coursing, seething through his veins; the deep-seated need to fight, to participate in the righteous carnage in the defence of his species; and to die a warrior. Had he not been told, in no uncertain terms, that that would not happen, and if he had not had Gonos, well perhaps there would be a different story to tell.

Botor leaned against Gonos, who bore much of his weight, and squeezed his arm. He carried an Earth weapon in his free hand. He’d insisted.

“All right, Jumper Three is just up ahead,” said Bates. “Here’s the plan. Jumper Three is parked, cloaked, in that clearing just past the rock formation. We’ll be visible from air while we make the crossing, so we have to be careful.”

“McKay reports significant ground presence near the Gate,” continued Bates, “so we’ll have to worry about that when we get there, too. Shouldn’t be a problem with the Turret and Jumper Three, but be warned.”

He looked directly at Botor and Gonos then, so Botor assumed he was saying all of this for their benefit. He nodded.

“And we can all hear the Wraith in this area,” Botor said.

“Right. Let’s move,” said Bates, and the small group once more began moving through the trees towards the clearing.

*

“ _Targeting error,”_ chirped the Machine patched into Rodney’s earpiece cheerfully. “ _Aborting program.”_

Well, fuck, that was… not something Rodney had any time to fix, given the current situation. He’d never been more thankful to the guy who’d invented automatic weapons than he was now, when he stood back to back with a stunningly gorgeous alien woman shooting into hordes of enemy space-vampires like something out of a bad sci-fi movie.

“ _Zelenka, can you remote troubleshoot the target program on the Turret?”_ he managed eventually.

“ _I—Ah, no. Is not possible.”_

“ _Why the fuck **not**?”_

“Rodney?” questioned Teyla.

“MegaTurret’s firing blind,” he said tersely, “at anything and everything in the air.”

“That is unfortunate.”

Rodney had to hold back a snort. Not the time. It wasn’t the end of the world, though, since none of the Jumpers would be coming through here, not until…

“Fuck,” he said. “Jumper Three still has to bring the Satedans through this way. I _need_ to fix the MegaTurret.”

Rodney tried to scrub together a plan, anything, that would allow him to fix the Turret without being overrun by what appeared to be _the entire fucking Wraith Hive_.

“Teyla, you’re going to have to manually control the Turret gun while I fix the target program.”

Wordlessly, Teyla sprung up onto the Turret and climbed into the manual control station. It had taken a considerable amount of retrofitting (and argument with the SGC) to get that placed, but Rodney felt vindicated now that they really needed it.

Now, instead of firing blindly at any moving aerial target, the Turret responded to Teyla. Made for a more practical but less precise arrangement than AI, thought Rodney, but that’s what he was supposed to be fixing anyway.

Dropping his gun to hang at his chest, Rodney fished out the tablet and fired up the Machine’s programming. Navigating hundreds of lines of code using a tablet, under fire from space vampires, was not a particularly efficient activity.

In the interest of expediency, Rodney simply restarted the program as before. It failed to start.

Reluctantly, through no other available options, Rodney began to scroll through the Machine’s tracking program to figure out what, if anything, was actually wrong.

He noticed, absently, the flying earth and trees and other debris from Teyla’s imaginative and effective use of environmental damage, as he finally found what looked like the offending piece of code. The program was too complex: it could identify almost every single Earth aircraft, puddle jumpers, Goa’uld ships, and now Wraith darts. One of those things had to go, and it couldn’t be Wraith darts or puddle jumpers. Goa’uld craft were embedded in the scavenged alien programming that allowed the tracking program in the first place, so those were out.

He skipped through some lines to check whether he could even remove the Earth data, and then found he couldn’t.

“Shit, shit, _shit_ ,” he shouted.

“What?” called Teyla. “Is there a problem?”

“You could say that!” shouted Rodney. He couldn’t remove the Earth aircraft portion of the program because the dart recognition depended almost entirely on that. Earth fighters looked similar to Wraith darts, moreso than puddle jumpers at any rate.

The only tracking component he could safely remove, and maintain effective function of the program, were the puddle jumpers. If he removed the code for recognition and validation, he figured the whole mess would function well enough to consistently track Wraith darts. The problem with that approach would be that jumpers wouldn’t be part of the program at all, so would be attacked indiscriminately. It would simplify the overall program immensely, because it hadn’t been designed to track jumpers and he assumed the jumpers were the biggest part of the problem.

He switched his earpiece to the Machine voice-command channel. If he was going to make such a fundamental change to this version of the program he should at least ask the Machine why the problem had happened. It was what they were for, after all.

“ _Machine, report error tracking program.”_

_“Puddlejumper Recognition Module failure. Diagnostic analysis revealed module as too intensive, inefficient, causing memory error and impaired function.”_

So the problem _actually was_ the puddle jumper tracking in the first place. Rodney sighed, then deleted all the code pertaining to it. He climbed up beside Teyla,, who had released the Turret controls, then looked on with dismay as Jumper One came cruising through the trees and the beam weapon initialised.

*

“ _The MegaTurret no longer has Puddle Jumper recognition,”_ came McKay’s voice in ear. “ _Repeat, the MegaTurret no longer has Puddle Jumper recognition. Fly carefully! That means you, Sheppard.”_

If McKay had told John that before he’d come crashing into full close-up range of the stolen ha’tak beam weapon he wouldn’t have done such a monumentally stupid thing, but the prickly scientist hadn’t and so that is exactly what John had done.

He narrowly swerved away from the beam, drawing several Wraith darts into it in the process. He weaved in and out of ha’tak beam fire and then, when he had a clear moment, released a single drone weapon into the mass of ground warriors trying to swarm the Gate.

“Looks like the Wraith are really trying to overwhelm the Gate,” said Ford.

“They _really_ don’t want to lose the Runners,” said Sheppard. “I guess it’s like hosting the Olympics and losing every event, or something.”

He glanced down at Rodney and Teyla, who could now at least breathe a little easier, before dodging yet another attack from the beam weapon.

“ _I’m gonna get the hell out of dodge,”_ he said to McKay and Teyla, then sped off out of range of the poorly-programmed MegaTurret. He then caught sight of something he didn’t really want to see: the Hive was landing.

*

Ronon Dex had entered into a state of complete and utter serenity, not that it looked that way to anyone around him. To anyone else, he was a brutal and vicious warrior in the throes of bloodlust. And he was, actually: using stolen weapons, and eventually his own scavenged gun after he’d found it, Ronon Dex shot the Wraith around him to pieces, then charged off in search of more.

He knew that he screamed when he attacked, and grunted, and made any number of different noises as he moved about his bloody business, but none of that registered. Nothing registered except the clean, efficient, advance and the death of fathomless numbers of Wraith.

Together, he and the Earthers had fought their way out of their cell, then through corridor upon corridor, and finally from floor to floor, in an attempt to bring the Wraith Hive crashing into the planet. Ronon had wanted to go on a frenzied rampage almost immediately, but the Earthers’ plan had no small amount of merit, and so he had slipped into the zen-like state of a true Satedan battle fury.

He would kill until there was nothing left to kill, or until he himself fell in the battle. That was the poetry of war.

He charged forward, roaring, and fired round after round into the regenerating Wraith soldiers. They’d made it close enough to the Hive control room for him to really fell invested in the plan, and so Ronon coursed forward again and again, until he finally met with actual resistance in the form of a tightly shut door.

He moved to fire at it, but was pushed out of the way by Lieutenant Frost.

“Let me.”

She strapped an odd material to the door, then cautioned him to move far back, and soon enough the door had been blown out. He had wondered what the Earthers had paused to collect when they found their things, though he had been more concerned with his own effects at the time.

“It’s called C4. Really useful,” she said, and then she (along with Tarann) threw two small devices into the control room. After a series of small explosions, Wilson directed the group to move forward.

“Prepare for combat,” he said, then moved inside the Wraith control room. The various organic components sparked and oozed various fluids alternately, and several of the Wraith inside had been killed in the explosion. Others hadn’t, and Ronon grappled with a burly Wraith soldier until Janus came to his rescue with an odd bolt shot directly to the back of its skull.

The Wraith crumpled and died instantly, leaving Ronon free to attend to the Wraith commander, the one who had set him Running in the first place.

“I’ll tear you limb from limb,” he promised, moving quickly to do just that.

The Commander didn’t even move to get its sidearm, inside dropping into something similar to a wrestling stance. When its hands were weapons, Ronon felt no compunctions to observe any kind of fighting honour by facing the Wraith hand to hand. He slipped his knife into his spare hand, then whirled around with his gun to shoot at the Wraith.

By now, the Hive had started rapidly moving towards the surface of the planet, so Ronon’s shot missed when the inertial dampening failed and the pair of them went crashing into the back wall.

He spun out of the fall and stabbed his knife directly into the Wraith’s feeding organ, then forced it up to separate the halves of the hand. Then, using his brief moment of surprise over the Wraith Commander, Ronon grasped another of his knifes, dropping his gun in the process, and drove it right into the base of the Commander’s skull, severing the brainstem.

The serenity began to fade away, and the world suddenly came crashing in around him, all sounds and smells and things he hadn’t realised he’d been ignoring.

“The Wraith Queen has escaped!” exclaimed Janus. “She transported via personnel ship, then transferred to a cruiser and into hyperspace.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Wilson. “Ship’s grounding, can’t stop that now.”

Ronon glanced around the room, taking in properly for the first time the true level of carnage. All the various systems – he had no idea what anything did, only that these things did something and were partially alive – were sparking, and oozing odd, viscous fluids. The viewport had gone black, which meant they were sitting blind as the ship had been sent crashing towards the Earth.

Maybe today was the day he died. He’d prepared for that. Now, after killing the Wraith Commander, he felt like he could go gladly.

*

In life, nothing is easy. Botor should have remembered that aphorism, today more than any other day. It had been an easy trip across a clearing, to the safety of an invisible spacecraft, and then away from the life as a Runner.

It was not going to go down that way. Not that Botor could see, anyway.

He fired into the approaching Wraith with gusto, then checked Gonos, and then checked for Sergeant Bates, who would signal the time to move towards the cloaked aircraft. He still stood and fought; the Earthers made for an impressive rescue team, he had to concede.

They brought with them advanced weapons and aircraft. They risked the lives of their own men and women to rescue _Runners_ , a byword for _pariah_ in many languages, for no apparent gain that Botor could see.

He would be glad to die with them, if that is how his destiny would play out.

He caught one of the Earthers as he threw another explosive device into the wave of attacking Wraith soldiers, sending torn limbs flying through the air. The signal from Bates!

“Gonos, we have to move quickly,” he said, drawing the other man’s attention to the signal.

“Right,” he said, and immediately stopped firing, and shifted his position to help Botor traverse the distance between their rock outcropping and the cloaked Earther craft. With several of Bates’s men covering, Botor felt safe enough to urge Gonos to concentrate only on getting to safety.

Soon enough the craft shimmered into existence, and the waiting team inside pulled the pair of Runners in and, when the rest of Bates’s team had joined them, closed the porthole and rose up, high into the sky.

“ _Package obtained_ ,” he heard Bates say. “ _Heading back to the Gate to drop off.”_

*

 _“Bates, I want you to stay this side of the Gate,”_ said Sheppard by way of reply to Bates’s declaration that the mission had been a success. “ _The Hive is landing.”_

Sheppard circled the skies above the forest and watched the haphazard descent of the Hive ship.

“More like crash landing…” he murmured, just loud enough for Ford to hear.

“ _… This is Sergeant Wilson… I repeat, this is Sergeant Wilson…”_

“ _Wilson! This is Sheppard, Jumper One.”_

“ _Thank fuck, Sir. We’re on the Hive. We took the Hive and the Queen fled to hyperspace. Requesting extraction.”_

Now _that_ was some pretty fucking good news, as far as Sheppard was concerned.

“ _We got the Runner, too.”_

 _“Good job. Make your way out of the Hive when it crashes and we’ll pick you up.”_ He paused. “ _How many Wraith left on the ship?_ ”

“ _Couldn’t say, sir. We have to fight our way out so I’ll let you know.”_

“ _Righto. Wilson, good luck. Sheppard out.”_

He spun the Jumper around and headed straight for the rapidly crashing Hive ship.

“Looks like things are going our way, sir,” said Ford.

“If Wilson and his team can fight their way out of the damned Hive,” he muttered. This sort of thing had the infuriating tendency to go bad just before the end.

*

Ronon glanced around the remains of the Wraith Hive control centre. Barely anything worked (he didn’t know that, but he’d been told that, so he assumed it was true), although the Earthers had been able to use its systems to send a message to their leader.

Ronon hadn’t much cared about its content, preferring instead to think about the best way to get off the Hive. It would entail fighting the remnants of the Wraith force aboard the ship, but that wasn’t much of hindrance in his thinking.

“I think we’re about to hit the ground,” said Lieutenant Frost, her tone overly cheerful. “Brace!”

Ronon had set himself between two fleshy, pulsating terminals, and braced himself against them for the impact. It didn’t seem to matter, since when the tons and tons of Hive hit the ground, all of them were sent flying across the room.

He grunted and pulled himself up.

“Nobody dead yet?” he said, the words uneasy. Nobody ways, which meant there were more of them left to fight. “Good.”

“Let’s get moving,” said Wilson, picking himself up from the ground and dusting himself off. “Make for the hangar bay and see what we can do from there.”

Ronon didn’t fall into a battle frenzy again. There was no need: their passage from the control hub to the hangar was easy, marked only by the occasional skirmish (which they won) leaving a trail of dead Wraith in their wake.

He couldn’t honestly say whether he believed anything he had just experienced had been real: he had killed the Wraith Commander responsible for the ruination of the fragments of the life he would have had after the cull of Sateda; he had been _freed_ from the life of a Runner with the aid of an unknown faction, despite his misgivings at first; and he had _taken down_ a Wraith Hive. It seemed a fever dream, and apart from that, he didn’t think he’d had enough time to process anything.

He’d done more in one day than he’d done in near a decade, and the day wasn’t over yet. The Earthers had ships that could take them to safety, to this planet of theirs which they had never mentioned by name. It had been a minor detail, but Ronon picked up on minor details because for a long time, those had been his only details. The faintest of sounds could mean death if he couldn’t hear them. He had to know the difference between his own mind and the Wraith projections.

Nothing seemed to help the current situation. His brain felt full. Too full.

He grunted in frustration as he shot down an advancing Wraith drone, confused by the absence of its Queen but spurred on by its aggression. It didn’t help the maelstrom in his head at all.

What did help was when, upon emerging into the hangar bay, he found a cylindrical ship waiting for them.

He felt…

He felt…

 _Something_ , for the first time in a long time, that wasn’t the absence of emotion. Was that freedom?


	6. Chapter 6

The Wraith Queen sat her makeshift throne upon her fleeing Cruiser, her face the picture of serenity, her drones calm surrounding her. Inside, she seethed. The psychic connection which tied her to her drones, her workers, and her Commanders, had weakened and in many cases been destroyed entirely.

It was all she could do to maintain order, project dominance, and control the flow of psychic chatter through the Wraith network. Her weakness would not be exploited, not in the wake of a disaster greater than any she had experienced in _centuries_. It had been centuries since humans had threatened the Wraith, not since the Wraith had shattered the ship-building civilisation and scattered its peoples, and she had been burnt then, too.

Hives had been threatened for the first time in centuries.

 _WHY?_ She projected the thought through to the science caste. _WHAT HAS CHANGED?_

The chatter stopped immediately. Then, within the briefest of moments, the Wraith Queen became flooded with images, impressions, thoughts.

Humans. Technologically advanced humans. Humans in—yes. The Lantean stealthships. Had the Lanteans returned? It did not seem likely. Descendants? Perhaps. They had attacked her Hive now, as they had attacked others. She saw the destruction of Hives using explosives not seen from humans in living human memory.

She spared a sliver of her gigantic Mind to observe the Hive. It had not yet been destroyed. Perhaps it—

 _NO!_ The psychic wave went without her blessing, and spread throughout her Wraith node, though she managed to stop it reverberating throughout the Network proper. Her connection to the Hive had broken.

She scrambled to the imprint herself upon her remaining followers, binding them to her will, establishing the order despite her lack of Hive. The drones fell into line easily, persuaded by the barest touch of her immense and powerful Mind. She did not require the Hive to establish dominance.

_I AM THE QUEEN._

The workers had been cowed. Her magnificent Mind rode the waves of the network and searched out the next faction.

_YOU ARE NOTHING WITHOUT THE NOURISHMENT OF MY MIND. SUBMIT TO ME OR WITHER INTO NOTHING._

The science caste bowed to her. Without the immensity of her powerful Mind the scientists would regress into drones.

**_The Hive Princess does not submit_ ** _._

The declaration almost sent the Queen reeling, but she was no mere child. The Wraith Queen had survived centuries. She measured her lifespan in millennia. She had faced down usurpers and won.

But she no longer held the Hive. Its mind was lost to her, as was the power it allowed her to exert over her node.

_I AM THE QUEEN. INFERIOR MINDS ARE MINE TO COMMAND._

Hive Princesses were potentially the most dangerous members of the Hive, from the perspective of a Hive Queen. Necessary for organisational purposes, and to prevent the decay of the Hive, but each one housed a weak and naïve Mind. These ordinarily posed no danger to a Queen so magnificent as the Hive Queen and her colossal Mind.

She could ordinarily dominate her three Princesses with ease. Two trembled even then under the weight of her Mind, but the third held firm.

**_The Princess will not submit._ **

_I AM THE HIVE QUEEN._

**_There is no Hive._ **

The Wraith Queen felt the ripple of excitement through the Wraith node she controlled. It is true, the scientists murmured, there is no Hive.

_WE WILL RAISE A NEW HIVE._

The excitement did not quiet. The workers had stirred with this, as the raising of a new Hive would fall upon their shoulders. She allowed it: she would provide new purpose for them. It was her will as Queen.

Her plans were many and vast, and she had an Ancient duty, an obligation, a Keeping. She would not be ousted in this, the final phase.

**_Yes, we will raise a new Hive. With a new Queen._ **

_I WILL DESTROY YOU FIRST._

The Wraith Queen bore down upon her wayward child with the full might of her unfathomable Mind. With the force of her node – such that it was, without the weight of the Hive – she tore into the lesser Mind of her daughter, and shattered it.

_I AM THE QUEEN. YOU WILL SUBMIT TO ME._

**_the princesses submit to the will of the Queen we are nothing under her Majesty we ask to be forgiven the fate of our sister is deserved_ **

The Hive Queen did not deign to answer their request for clemency. She would not harm her remaining daughters, her youngest, for the weakness of Mind to fall prey to their more powerful sister. The Queen did not regret the destruction of her eldest remaining daughter. There would be more daughters. Some day the remaining Hive Princesses would challenge her.

They would not survive the challenge.

It was of no consequence at present. The Hive Queen flooded the Network with the vastness of her Mind, and directed her Commanders to prepare the ship for hyperspace exit.

They had reached their destination.

The Wraith Queen rose from her throne and stared out of the viewport. She had lost her Hive. She had lost workers and drones, and scientists, and Commanders. Her Hive was a broken Hive, a wandering Hive, a Hive without a home.

Ordinarily such a Hive would be assimilated, its Queen and Princesses executed. Such a thing would not happen to so great a Mind, a Keeper of the Secret of Secrets.

The Cruiser dropped out of hyperspace, and the Queen sent ripples of joy through her node.

They had emerged in the heart of a raging ion storm. An ancient biomechanical construct occupied much of the space inside the storm, constructed in a hybrid Lantean/Wraith style that had not been seen since the earliest days of the Great War. A gigantic space station, unique and unlike anything ever grown by Wraith engineers again, with space enough to dock twelve Hives.

The Wraith Queen did not need to dock a Hive, but she had space aplenty. The Commanders docked with the great, ancient space station and the Queen moved quickly.

The next phase of her plan could not be achieved by anyone other than herself, and so she readied a team of drones, workers and a Commander, and entered the facility.

The facility did not possess a Mind, which would have made the exalted Queen’s task simplicity itself, although it had been at least in part grown using biotechnology developed by pioneer Wraith scientists. She knew the history. She had not lived this, the most ancient of ancient, but she had lived in its immediate aftermath.

The Wraith Queen was perhaps the most ancient of all Wraith Queens, others having been slain by young challengers or assimilated into stronger, more dominant, Hives. Still, even she did not remember the secrets of how to blend the dead Lantean technologies with their living tools, and so the architecture appeared alien to her.

Eventually she found the ancient chamber, keyed the ancient code, and entered.

Inside the small chamber were twenty four stasis pods of an interesting design. They resembled neither Wraith nor Lantean, and yet had Lantean symbols covering their surfaces. It was these symbols which the Wraith Queen used to navigate her way to the correct pod.

Once there, she glanced down at its contents.

Inside, a tall and thin Wraith woman, her skin and hair both the brightest of whites, slept. More than ten thousand years ago, long before the end of the Great War, the greatest of the Wraith and members of a caste never seen since had been placed into stasis aboard the space station and hidden within a perpetual ion storm.

These Wraith were legendary, and stories were told of how each of the Twelve Hives descended from a pair of ancient heroes. There would come a time when they would be needed once again, or so the legends maintained, but most had forgotten the truth of the ancient stories. Knowledge of their existence had been passed from Keeper to Keeper in the millennia since, but information had largely been lost and forgotten. One Hive Queen remembered because she had been there to hear the instruction at the very beginning.

“Mother,” the Wraith Queen whispered, and deactivated the stasis pod. “It is time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took longer than I expected it to because I had to rewrite chapter 5 entirely after I finished it, and then I added chapter 6. The interlude isn't written yet either, but that will follow some time soon. I'm going to post the entire next story when I've got it all finished so you don't end up with a massive cliffhanger for a while like with this one! Thanks for sticking with it, I really appreciate it! Hope you enjoyed. It really was a marathon.


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